What if I told you that you were one of the first hurdles to your athlete's performance? That your athlete would be able to do the things you worked hard to do. You don't have to be perfect at them but you have to be willing to go through the process of working at them the same way you wanted your athlete to work at them...at the very least.
Lets take growth mindset as an example. Growth mindset is the belief that we can improve at the things we put effort into. By its very nature that involves working at things we are not naturally strong at.... So, as a coach do you have the tolerance to stomach your athlete working at something they are not strong at? Sometimes to take a big step forward we have to change our mechanics or make an adjustment in our game. What do you as the coach do during this time? Can you stomach your best athlete not putting up results for a while? Can you stomach and sit with them through their frustration and failures and keep the end game in mind? Can you handle the parents criticism, the AD's criticism or the GM's criticism during this time? This is the space you create for your athlete. This will become their ceiling for handling this struggle and failure time. This is how you model growth mindset.
I have been surprised in mental performance how often we teach a skill that we may never have fully used. I've done it. I have taught how to do imagery without ever having guided someone through it. I gotta tell you, I got a lot better at teaching it, and my athletes got a lot better at doing it when I was doing it with them. It was a huge change...and...I learned a lot about how the skill works, where it works and where it doesn't.
So what if as coaches we are our athlete's first ceiling. What if the environment we create and the way we model within it matters A LOT. What are you modeling?
I know as we thought about the All Terrain Project we realized we loved the idea of it. We also realized the quality of our instructors is EVERYTHING. Someone could replicate the idea of the program but replicating the type of instructors we have...well I think that would be very hard to do.